The tip of the iceberg

Power, paedophile rings and an establishment cover-up

Child grooming and paedophile rings are very much in the news currently. Many of the cases highlighted by the media have focused on Asian Muslim men grooming white girls, but what has been largely swept under the carpet by the press to date is the increasingly widely available evidence on the Internet about rings involving powerful politicians and public figures.

In Oxford last week, three men including an 81-year old pensioner were arrested after police executed a search warrant at Nanford Guest House. They stand accused of drugging and raping and selling “vulnerable schoolgirls” into prostitution. The warrant was issued following evidence emerging during a case at the Old Bailey last month where seven other men were convicted of a catalogue of offences, including conspiracy to rape, child prostitution and trafficking over an 8-year period.

In a report, published today by the Home Affairs Select Committee, similar cases in Rochdale and Rotherham are highlighted as examples where councils failed to stop the sexual use of young people in their care. Councils are highlighted as being “inexcusably slow” whilst their executives are said to have shown a “woeful lack of professional curiosity” to child sex allegations.

These case and others are indeed shocking but one has to ask why their has not been more wider reporting as to why Operation Fernbridge, which is looking into a “VIP paedophile ring” at the Elm Guest House in Rocks Lane, near Barnes Common in London, has so far been allocated just £25,000 in funds since its launch in January 2013 despite 300 investigative lines having been highlighted. By comparison, Operation Weeting, the inquiry into the phone hacking scandal, had just 77 investigative lines yet cost an astounding £11,200,000.

The Elm Guest House, which was owned by a German named Carole Kasir and her Pakistani-British Haroon “Harry” Kasir between 1979 and 1983, is said to have been established as a “refuge for homosexuals in the 1970s, but soon became a place where men had sex with young prostitutes and later, allegedly, boys and girls from the now-closed Grafton Close children’s home in nearby Hounslow”. Amongst those who carried advertisements “strongly recommend[ing]” the Elm Guest House’s “sauna with video facilities” in 1982 was the magazine of the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality.

Whilst the Elm Guest House was raided in 1982 and Harry and Carole Kasir were charged with running an immoral house, the police then chose not to delve further at that time.

In February 2013, a campaigner from the National Association Of Young People In Care (NAYPIC) told the Daily Mail:

“Carole Kasir had logbooks, names, times, dates, even pictures of people who went in and out of Elm Guest House”.

“The police say it was done by a local force, but I know it was done by Special Branch. That evidence — of who visited Elm Guest House — no longer exists”.

“I’ll leave people to draw their own conclusions, but Carole Kasir was held without charge for three days, and you don’t do that on a run-of-the-mill vice raid. There was more to it than that”.

“There were boys found in the home, but they were only ever interviewed as witnesses to the brothel, never as victims of abuse”.

A further investigation into the activities at the Elm Guest House in 2003 is said to have been “stymied by an establishment cover-up”.

Dossiers and lists of the politicians, individuals linked to Buckingham Palace and even a pop star known to flaunt his Christianity who frequented the Elm Guest House are widely available on the Internet. Many of them are still alive and many of them are extremely prominent people still. It is not known whether these documents are accurate or indeed genuine.

The household names most widely shared online with known links to paedophilia, though, are said to have included the traitorous Soviet spy Sir Anthony Blunt (1907 – 1983), the diplomat Sir Peter Hayman (1942 – 1992) and the Liberal politician and Member of Parliament for Rochdale, Sir Cyril Smith (1928 – 2010). Evidence connecting all three of these men to alleged sexual offences dates back as far as 1981 when, for example, a Conservative MP named Geoffrey Dickens (1931 – 1995) used parliamentary privilege to ask why Hayman had not been prosecuted after having left a package of paedophilia related materials on a London bus in 1978.

Others who frequented the guest house were allegedly Anthony Peters, Colin Peters and Warwick Spinks. This gruesome trio were all subsequently separately convicted in the 1980s and 1990s for sexual assaults, taking indecent images of children and being members of child sex abuse rings elsewhere.

As Carole Kasir “strangely” died of an insulin overdose in June 1990, she cannot be questioned again now. Of her mysterious death at the age of 47, a blog named The Slog reports:

“A suicide note was presented in evidence, but two child protection workers and a private detective queried the provenance of the note, telling the court Kasir feared for her life because of what she knew. She had been receiving threatening phone calls, and was being harassed by police, they argued”.

Carole Kasir’s “boy brothel boss” husband, Harry Kasir, the Mirror reported in February 2013, however, is said to be “making plans to raise £60,000 to emigrate to the US” but was raided by detectives at his current home in Richmond at the beginning of the year. It is quite possible, therefore, that he could well have had evidence that will prove or disprove allegations made to Operation Fernbridge.

The late Geoffrey Dickens MP, it can now also be revealed, gave the then Home Secretary, Sir Leon Brittan, a dossier of the names of prominent figures involved in paedophilia in November 1983 as part of his campaign against the Paedophile Information Exchange, a contact group for gay men interested in sex with children.

Yesterday, as part of research for an Independent article about the Elm Guest House and this information, a journalist named Martin Hickman contacted Sir Leon Brittan to ask “what the dossier alleged and what action, if any, he took”. The former cabinet minister is quoted in response as simply saying: “I have no recollection of these matters. Sorry!”

Brittan’s level of disinterest is telling. The house of cards that was the Elm Guest House truly was the haunt of some truly powerful monsters and they have been protected for too long. It is time these individuals, dead or alive, were exposed for what they were and are. Equally, it is essential that those still living are brought to justice and more importantly, it is time that this disgraceful establishment cover-up is brought to an end.

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